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The 2015 Consumer Electronics Show is definitely missing a bet. The CES press is talking breathlessly about drones, futuristic self-driving cars, and glamorous wristbands telling me what I don’t really need to know every minute of every day. I must admit that the report about a refrigerator with eight USB ports from General Electric’s First Build had me going—until I saw the $3000 ticket that First Build wants for this toy. Sorry, GE. No sale.

Connectivity as the big watch-word? (Yawn.) That’s not only not even yesterday’s catch word, it’s older than last year’s catch word.

So the Girl Scouts are in your show. A thrill for the girls, but not for homeowners like me. Obviously, the participants in the show have not spent five minutes a day at home. What this country really needs is genuine connectivity from the grocery store to the parking lot, to my shelves at home, and into my fridge. And make it affordable! Sorry, but the big chain-store delivery truck drivers don’t bring the goods to my kitchen, figure out where everything should be placed and place it there. Where is development of an affordable household inventory system for such items as toilet tissue, shoe strings, tooth paste, light bulbs and laundry detergents? Where is the app that reads and translates the weird codes that still show up on products? And I don’t just mean the bar codes either.

I don’t want or need a car that drives itself. I’m not quite certain I want to see my friendly postal carrier replaced by a drone. I don’t want or need a 3-D printer that produces the Teddy Bear of the Month. I would rather have self-cleaning drains, a driveway and walkway that melt the ice that coats them in a storm, and self-storing groceries, thank you very much. I’ll be watching from here next year in case the media starts talking about robots for teaching two-year-olds how to build drones.

Recently I have been under a lot of stress. My good friend and quintessential practical networker Ramona, seeing that I was definitely in need of a therapeutic experience, invited me to join her and another friend to visit West Virginia’s Berkeley Springs spa. Never having visited any spa—and pretty well burned out—I agreed to the adventure. Soaking for 30 minutes in a huge ceramic tub of minueral water heated to 102 degrees was a delightful experience I will never forget. I’m hooked on the experience. I recommend the experience. I’ll be back.

DUB-DUB-DUB

(Now Optional)

A while back, my Toastmaster friend from California George—a webmaster by profession—pointed out that for anyone to visit my website, the infamous “WWW” (aka “dub-dub-dub”) had to precede PEQUODSYSTEMS. All that has now been changed, and you can now get to our website by simply entering PEQUODSYSTEMS.COM in your browser.

Recently Dan Rex, the CEO of Toastmasters International, announced that the TI Board of Directors had decided to institute new District officer titles that, among other reasons, would “Create a parallel between district leadership and leadership in the corporate and volunteer sectors.” Basically, the idea is to help volunteers easily explain to current and potential employers what knowledge, skills and abilities they were likely to have acquired by participating in these roles.

All very nice and mostly window-dressing, insofar as many members have thought.

Recently, I sat down with George Marshall, whose online Toastmaster Tools are used by members around the globe. I asked him that very question, and here is what he said.

During my year as Toastmasters Area Governor, I became very interested in the big differences in club quality, and as I gathered data about each of my clubs to try to help them, I realized that the information I wanted was sometimes hard to gather in useful form. I learned a lot that year about downloading the reports and doing my own analysis in spreadsheets.

After a while, I decided to automate the more time-consuming tasks. I started working on what eventually became the Tools for Toastmasters website, summarizing some of the reports in real-time. After a year or so, I realized that the data would be more useful if it were in a database, which I knew nothing about. But I sat out to learn how, and with the help of mentors, within a year or so, the core of today’s site was in place, with built-in summaries and analysis of several types of Toastmaster data.

I have learned a lot about databases with this project, some of which I have been able to apply to our business. [Freemont Web Solutions].

Often in social media, the highly-talented and dedicated people whose services make life a whole lot better are forgotten. That’s because they are not the ones who show up in social media. They are the ones who often show up at our homes at our convenience to make the fixes and repairs we cannot do ourselves.

This post is about one very special master plumber who has made our lives better and who is not here in social media.

I live in a house that was built before certain plumbing standards were in effect. An outside spigot broke. This was a real problem for us, since we had invested in a number of ornamental plants around our yard, and just one dry season would be the end of them. According to several other so-called experts repair would have been expensive beyond belief. Some of those so-called experts said there was no way to repair the spigot.

Then came the day we needed some other plumbing repairs. We had made a point of asking for the individual contact information of one of the plumbers who had completed a number of other plumbing jobs in a very satisfactory manner. He was the one who explained to us what the specific plumbing issues were, what caused them and how they might be prevented in the future.

We looked up James. He arrived on time and got straight to work. We showed him the “impossible” spigot repair. James, a creative sort, looked at the job and proposed what no other plumber had proposed: plugging the original line to the spigot and installing a new line with a new spigot. All for a price we were willing and able to pay. Shortly thereafter, the original line was plugged. He had drilled a new line through our cinderblock basement wall and installed a new line and spigot.

James. What a pro who really thinks differently than “the other guys.” You are the best!

As the 2013 year winds down, I find myself musing about the language we use to talk about technology. As a friend of mine observed a while back, every time the online technology comes up with a new feature/experience, the technologists and their marketers struggle to find the right words to describe that experience and its unique selling proposition.

Many of a certain age will remember when “hanging out” was a bad thing tinged with the suggestion of juvenile delinquency. Not since Google brought out Google + Hangouts. I participate with a group that recently struggled with whether to call itself online or virtual. Gone are the days when a cloud was simply a fluffy vision in the sky. Now it’s a fluffy way to tell end users that the computer they are using to communicate with others is not in the same facility they are. Just as there are hybrid cars, there are hybrid clouds, which the Webopedia says is a ” combined form of private clouds and public clouds in which some critical data resides in the enterprise’s private cloud while other data is stored in and accessible from a public cloud. Hybrid clouds seek to deliver the advantages of scalability, reliability, rapid deployment and potential cost savings of public clouds with the security and increased control and management of private clouds.Really old-timers still think of a tweet as a sound made by a bird. Avatar spawned the word Gravitar for WordPress users. Bitcoin has been around for a while, and now has been entered into the Webopedia. My picture in this blog is a selfie—a picture I took of myself. Then there is BYOD —Bring Your Own Device, a concept that used to scare corporate systems managers into hiding. The phrase SoftwareAs A Service is a yawner from yesterday. Now we have Anything As a Service and Everything as a Service, both of which are abbreviated as XaaS. Now that’s just plain weird. I think I’ll go have an eggnog and wish all of you a happy holiday and a great new MMXIV.

What kind of organization(s) do you belong to? Several years ago, I belonged to the American Library Association, a professional and educational non-profit organization organized along the lines of the interests and support of its membership. In 1974, its membership was just over 34,000. That year, the ALA council ratified a resolution supporting ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. A 1977 resolution called for future conferences to be held only in states that had ratified the ERA, beginning with the 1981 Annual Conference. This was no small decision for the ALA, since its headquarters was–and still is–in Illinois, a State that had not ratified the ERA. ALA members and the council were essentially putting their money where the best interests of its membership were. More accurately, they had decided not to put their money where their interests were not supported. (1)

Now I belong to another 501(c)(3) educational organization. This organization’s bylaws say that

This corporation shall not discriminate, in the conduct of its programs and activities, against any person on the basis of age (except those persons under 18 years of age), race, color, creed, gender, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, or physical or mental disability, so long as the individual, through his or her own effort, is able to participate in the program or activity.

This organization has scheduled its August 2014 International Convention in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. As of this year, Human Rights Watch reported that In violation of international standards against discrimination, Malaysian leaders continue to denigrate lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) persons. Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak gave speeches in June and July 2012 in which he asserted that the activities of LGBT people do not “have a place in the country.”

On March 28, the Guardian ran a story by Kate Hodal which said

A government-backed musical in Malaysia that aims to warn young people about the perils of being lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) in this Muslim-majority country has sparked controversy over its “state-sponsored bigotry” and potential to incite hatred.

Asmara Songsang (Abnormal Desire) follows the lives of three LGBT friends who throw loud parties, take drugs and have casual sex, thereby incurring the wrath of their religious neighbours, who attempt to reintroduce them to the teachings of Islam. Those who repent are spared, while those who don’t are killed in a lightning storm.

While not itself discriminating against members of the LGBT community, the organization has invited its membership to spend money in a country that violates international standards of discrimination—one of which is directly related to sexual orientation. It has also committed to put its money —and the money of its membership—where one of its own bylaws speaks to a different value.

Recently a rather new acquaintance posted a cartoon on FaceBook. The cartoon featured an old-fashioned professor seated at an outdoor desk in front of a class consisting of a bird, a monkey, a penguin, an elephant, a goldfish in a bowl, a seal and a dog. Behind them was a tree. The professor spoke to them and said “For a fair selection, everybody has to take the same exam. Please climb that tree.”

I was immediately reminded of Albert Einstein, who is credited with saying “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

And then I thought about how a lot of my friends and I spend a lot of our time completely ignoring family and friends who are not “in the Cloud.” Ignoring family and friends who are not even computer users. Some of those family and friends are not computer users completely by choice. Some of those family and friends are, instead, avid book readers. Books—not tablets. Books, as in sheets of paper bound together and words printed on the paper.

Recently, I have begun to realize how easy it is for an uneasy relationship to develop between those of us who do use computers and those of us who choose not to do so. It’s far too easy. And those of us who ARE part of the Internet can, to those who are not, appear to be arrogant.

Then I read and listened to Carl Sagan’s Episode 11 of The Cosmos, The Persistence of Memory. In it, he saysWhat an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Carl Sagan

Indeed.

I have several acquaintances who never come near a computer. Are they stupid? No. In many cases, they have simply made a lifestyle choice. One of them is an avid reader who has been known to haunt second-hand bookstores, and walk out with an armload of books and a happy grin. Another chooses to connect in real time with members of her community in a way that many of us in the Internet world may never experience.

Recently, I looked at a lengthy LinkedIn list of “Thought Leaders.” Presumably, these are people whom unspecified others recognize as an authority in a specialized field and whose expertise is sought and often rewarded. The extensive LinkedIn list included such notables as Richard Branson (2,272,487 followers), Tony Robbins (588,125 followers), Guy Kawasaki (262,572 followers) and so many others that the bottom of the LinkedIn page of 90 notables said “show more” at the bottom.

I was definitely underwhelmed.

For the past four days, I have been trying to figure out what have these thought leaders actually done for me or my family and friends lately? Nothing came to my mind.

Then DOVE CANADA came to my attention.

According to the August 5 Canadian issue of Huffpost Style,

Dove Canada says it has created a Photoshop Action that reverts edited images back to their original, un-airbrushed state.

The local division of the skincare company went black ops recently for its latest “Campaign for Real Beauty” stunt, going so far as to create and post the downloadable Action file to social media sites like Reddit (the post has since been removed by its user).

While the file promises to beautify images with a single click, in reality it reverts the edits that had been made to the photo, while adding a banner that says, “Don’t manipulate our perceptions of Real Beauty.”

As a woman in a profession which only relatively recently has included more women, I deeply appreciate the Dove Canada Real Beauty (inner beauty) campaign. Frankly, for a long time, women in my profession who appeared to be physically attractive were often not taken seriously by men in technical training classes and in professional meetings. We often got the message that our questions were less than worth paying attention to, and answers were often short, and not necessarily sufficient. The man next to us was likely to be called on very quickly.

The Dove campaign for girls and women to appreciate ourselves and nourish our self-esteem has resonated with me for many years. I have used Dove products since I was in college. Detractors aside, I find it refreshing to see a large, well-known company take bold and creative action which backs up a campaign of words.

It’s one thing to be a “thought leader” with a list of tens or hundreds of thousands of LinkedIn followers. It’s another thing altogether to lead not only with thought, but also with action to match. Now that’s leadership!

Dear Malala,We at Pequod Systems hear you loud and clear. And we were deeply moved by your recent speech at the U.N. Youth Assembly in New York City. We look forward to the day there is a documentary about your efforts to encourage the education of all girls, women and children. While we are blessed to be in a country where women are not shot for trying to get an education, we have also been around long enough to have watched a dramatic change in the numbers of girls and women being encouraged to enter technical fields astechniciansrather than as secretaries.

Malala, as a young girl, I was encouraged only to be a secretary to someone who would be far more intelligent than I was assumed to be. Enter my husband and first computing mentor Grant. He knew I have a mind of my own and gently encouraged me to learn to use his first computer—an Apple II+. Later, he bought a server on which I managed a database created by my second mentor, Ed Fox.

Ed taught me one of the best lessons I would ever learn about data management: Where does the data come from, who will benefit by its use, and what is your plan for managing it when your first plan does not exactly work the way you thought it would?

David Rorabaugh was my third computing mentor. David had no truck with those who minimized women for any reason, and was a visionary who understood and talked about the future of Windows. He was a Certified NetWare Engineer when I was on a government contract with him. Eventually we both were taking—and passing—the same professional examinations and comparing notes with each other.

Today, while the number of women computer technicians is still significantly lower than the number of men in the field, I believe there has been a generational attitude shift among younger men about women and computing. A Google search shows a lot of articles about women in computing. Most encouraging (to me, at least) there is a Philadelphia-based Network of Women in Computer Technology which focuses on mentoring young girls who might want to enter the field.

Malala, keep speaking out as you did on your birthday. In some parts of the world, women are making progress. In others, we still need an army of your friends who believe in supporting the education of all women, girls and children just as you do. Thank you for your inspirational example.

I am a huge fan of computing avatars. An avatar—an image that represents you online—can be charming, educational, political or even slightly shocking. Traditionally, avatars on Internet forums are square and placed next to the user’s post. Some of the most creative avatars I’ve seen have appeared right on FaceBook. One of my friends uses a picture of a building in his home country as his avatar. The Charles M. Schulz Museum uses the delightful picture below of world-famous Snoopy and his friend Woodstock.

Then there are gravatars. A gravatar is a Globally Recognized avatar. Upload it to your profile, and whenever you participate in a Gravatar-enabled site, your gravatar image automatically follows you there. Enter blavatars. WordPress, the platform this blog is created on, invented the word to refer to a graphic uploaded to a WordPress blog. The blavatar may serve as a favicon (a tiny favorite icon), and can show up in various ways. They may show up in a browser’s address bar or on browser tabs. All interesting. All attention-getters. All fun.

If you only use FaceBook to stay in touch with your far-flung family and not to conduct business, it’s quite acceptable to use a picture of a baby as your avatar, or as a part of your social media profile. However, beware of using such a graphic if you are a representative of a major corporation not in the business of marketing products for babies. Recently someone with a picture of a baby in her profile invited me to connect in LinkedIn. I ignored the invitation to connect. Not only am I not in the market for products for babies. I have a hard time taking seriously anyone in a professionally-oriented site who then not only does not include a professional-looking headshot but who also hides behind a picture of a baby. Or was that person simply a babe in the woods? Was it a fake profile? I don’t know. I’m simply moving on. I suspect I am not alone.